US Senate Republicans forced the issue on Ukraine aid. Now comes the hard part - Washington Post

Last week, Senate Republicans capitulated when the House GOP signaled it wouldn’t take up a bipartisan bill that combined border security with funding for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.

Rather than forcing the issue by showing how much Senate GOP support the bill had, even the deal’s supporters voted against proceeding with it.

This week, Senate Republicans went in a very different direction.

Despite House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) signaling that the House wouldn’t vote on the aid bill that stripped out the border security measures, 22 Senate Republicans voted for it.

The bill passed 70-29. The question now becomes just how much pressure the GOP senators have applied, and how committed the party’s foreign policy hawks are to compelling the House to act.

The internal and inter-chamber GOP clash that was forestalled on the border security deal might well be coming on the Ukraine-Israel-Taiwan supplemental.

The Senate vote reinforced something that has been plainly evident: that these pieces of legislation in all likelihood have strong majority support in both chambers. To the extent they’re not going to become law, it’s because House Republicans refuse to allow a vote.

The Senate vote demonstrated that — in spades. Getting 70 votes on something major is rare in this polarized age. It received the votes not just of 71 percent of senators who were voting, but 46 percent of Republican senators. The level of support echoed how the House has voted on Ukraine funding — the bulk of the aid bill — in the past. Every Ukraine funding vote in the House has received at least 73 percent support.

Ukraine funding opponent Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) reportedly acknowledged Tuesday, “If it were to get to the floor, it would pass; let’s just be frank about that.” [ Ukraine aid epitomizes an increasingly broken Congress]

There have been instances in which the House has punted [not taking up for vote] on issues receiving around this level of Senate support, but not many.

The justification for the House not voting on this bill would likely be that it doesn’t have majority support in the House GOP, which is a key threshold that House leadership often uses. Republican support for funding Ukraine has gradually fallen since Russia’s February 2022 invasion, to the point where the last funding vote received 46 percent support in the House GOP — the same figure from Tuesday’s Senate vote.

But that doesn’t mean Republicans who support the aid can’t try, and 22 Senate Republicans have at least gotten the ball rolling. There is already talk among Democrats of a discharge petition, in which a vote can be forced by a majority of the
House — i.e. the vast majority of Democrats and enough House GOP foreign policy hawks.

If a similar percentage of House Democrats supported the bill as Senate Democrats (just three on their side voted no on Tuesday), you’d need fewer than two dozen House Republicans to support a discharge petition. This option is regularly floated but rarely invoked.